12 June 2013 7:06 PM

Sexism in the music industry, Jenni? Who'd have thought it...

It is an appalling thing, but it seems some women may have
succeeded in getting on in the world of music with the help of their looks.

We are indebted for this insight to Jenni Murray, the
presenter of Woman’s Hour on Radio Four, who has told us ‘the women who seem to
be most welcome are the ones who are prepared to go along with the old idea
that sex sells.’

Perhaps that is why there are so few women composers whose
work we hear in the concert halls and opera houses. If only they had had the
chance to do a turn on the catwalk, perhaps a bikini round, interviews in which
they could talk about their ambition to be an all-round entertainer, then we
might get the odd female-penned tone poem in the Proms.

Or not.

Perhaps it might be instead that Dame Jenni has opened her
mouth with the knee-jerk feminism gear engaged, without regard to tyre wear or
road conditions.

There are a few things that stick in the throat about her
condemnation of sexism in the music world.

The first is the bizarre notion that Jenni Murray appears to
have picked up somewhere that music should be a pure and noble art, untouched
by low and contemptible distractions like sex or showbiz.

I would have thought that performers have been very
obviously using sex to sell elite music to the crowned heads of Europe and
anybody else with any money to pay for it since about the beginning of the 17th
century. Roll over Vivaldi, tell Monteverdi the news.

And the very idea that anybody might try to puff music with
cheap publicity and glamour is entirely offensive, except to Miss Murray’s
employers at the BBC who use exactly those methods to promote the Proms and
Radio Three, and to anybody else over the centuries who ever tried to turn an
honest shilling by advertising to attract an audience.

Then we have Dame Jenni’s list of shame, in which she
trotted out examples of how women have been ‘downgraded, excluded and downright
insulted’ in various instances. There was the conductor who didn’t want fat
women in his orchestra and the percussionist teased about her cymbals, not to
mention the woodwind player subjected to sexual innuendo.

Apparently there was a case in which an orchestra member was
told she was taking a man’s job and should be at home looking after her
children. This happened as recently as 1959, according to Dame Jenni. All very regrettable and unfair.

But, unfortunately, people do behave badly, even in modern
times. We all wish it were otherwise, but there it is. Music has never been
free of the prejudices that infect the rest of the world. If you wanted to look
at the underside of the history of music, you might, for example, find a bit of
anti-semitism there as well.

Is that any reason to pick on the women performers who
succeed?

But that is precisely what Dame Jenni does.

Harping on her theme about how the successful female
musicians are the ones who sell sex, she said: ‘Look at the way violinist
Nicola Benedetti and trumpeter Alison Balsom are marketed.’

What are the highly glamorous Benedetti and Balsom supposed
to do? Suppress their pictures and demand their recordings are sold under plain
cover? Shave their hair, dress frumpy, and try to look ordinary while they
play?

It seems, however, that according to the musical morality of
Jenni Murray, there are legitimate ways in which someone might resort to
shameless self-promotion.

You may, for example, take advantage of your position as a
famous radio presenter to seize the chance to show off by conducting the BBC
Philharmonic Orchestra, when your programme does a special about women in
music.

Dame Jenni, who will entertain us with the overture to
Carmen after first taking an hour’s tuition from conductor Jessica Cottis,
admits to a musical career which amounted to four piano lessons and a spell as
triangle in her school band

Quiet at the back there. It’s nothing to do with Kate
O’Mara’s Triangle.

I’m sure Dame Jenni is using her celebrity selflessly to
advance the cause of women in music.

It’s just that I can’t help feeling she might have given the
airtime and the exposure to someone else, perhaps a young woman conductor, who
might have liked the chance to reach a wider audience than usual.

I’m going to give Dame Jenni’s effort a miss, and stick to
Benedetti and Balsom. They may not score highly on Murray scale of feminist
purity. But at least they can play their instruments.

Why is Jenni so upset about the pretty females in the music industry? We females have been ogling pretty males in the very same business for many decades. Elvis, The Beatles, Take That, Justin Bieber (can't believe I just typed that) and hundreds of others do not exactly look like the back end of buses. I would suggest that Ms Murray is suffering from older woman jealousy of her juniors.

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